Spotlight: The National 4: Australian Art Now

Sydney’s leading visual arts institutions, Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Campbelltown Arts Centre (C-A-C), Carriageworks, and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), will showcase forty-eight new artist projects involving more than eighty artists from across Country, generations, and communities for the fourth edition of The National, on now.

The National 4: Australian Art Now features bold, distinctive, and experimental works that reflect the diversity and vitality of the art being made in Australia today. In a joint statement, curators Beatrice Gralton (AGNSW), Emily Rolfe (C-A-C), Freja Carmichael and Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley (Carriageworks), and Jane Devery (MCA) said, “Collectively the artists in The National 4 contribute to broader conversations across a range of critical ideas, including intergenerational learning, community and social interconnectedness, the role of language, and personal narratives that acknowledge broader social and political issues.”

Highlights include Heather B Swann’s Leda and the Swan, 2018–23, at AGNSW, “a contemporary wrestle with this ancient story’s aspects of sexual violence that have often been suppressed or ignored by artists in favour of a sensuous-erotic reading,” writes Gralton. Three perspectives or retellings, three vulnerable female forms, three seductive swans; and one human-head Ouroboros endlessly swallowing its own tail to form a cycle of violence. Swann’s ongoing installation series is “a story about force and consent,” one that “will be told ‘again and again and again until it changes.’”

Heather B Swann, Leda and the Swan, 2018–23, installation view, The National 4: Australian Art Now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2023. Photograph: © Art Almanac

Isabel and Alfredo Juan Aquilizan with the Fruitjuice Factori Studio explore migration, family, and cultural displacement in Coherent Narratives, 2023, an installation at C-A-C comprising four individual sculptural assemblages responding to themes of journey, from a giant upended boat to a Tetris-style stuffed wardrobe full of personal belongings, family keepsakes, and other accumulated materials.

At Carriageworks, Jo Lloyd’s FM Air, 2023, is a new dance performed by Rachael Wisby, Thomas Woodman, and Lloyd, who move in a continuous bind, oscillating in a transparent fabric bag. Lloyd’s practice often uses movement as a social encounter and non-verbal behaviour. Here, the dancers map their own choreography; twisted limbs and impulsive moves as revolving pirouettes are disrupted by contracted gestures. Bodies moving back and forth, towards and away from one another in a dramatic narrative.

Jo Lloyd, FM Air, 2023, dance performance, sound, 40:00 minutes, Performers: Jo Lloyd, Rachael Wisby, Thomas Woodman, performance view, The National 4: Australian Art Now, Carriageworks, Sydney, 2023. Photograph: Zan Wimberley

And MCA presents the video installation YOYI (dance), 2020, produced by artists from Jilamara Arts Centre, filmed on Country in the remote Milikapiti community in the Tiwi Islands. Images of thirty artists, each performing a ceremonial yoyi (dance), alternate across the gallery’s four walls; the rhythmic undercurrent of clapping and song grips the audience, who follow every beat and sequential screening.

 

Museum of Contemporary Art
Until 9 July 2023

Carriageworks
Until 25 June 2023

Art Gallery of New South Wales
Until 23 July 2023

Cambelltown Arts Centre
Until 25 June 2023

the-national.com.au

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